Apollo 13's Jim Lovell: Houston, we have a real problem

The hero of Apollo 13 thinks that space exploration has lost direction, and
it's time for an international effort to get a man to Mars

It took the Cold War to put the first man on the Moon, but it’s going to take cooperation between the world’s spacefaring nations if we are going to venture on to Mars. That is the verdict of Jim Lovell, one of the greatest space heroes of the Apollo adventure – itself a feat of exploration that seems more extraordinary and difficult today than it did four decades ago.

It was a poignant moment when Lovell visited the Science Museum last week to accept the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators’ premier award, its Guild Award of Honour for Aviation Heroism and Professionalism.

As he stood before the museum’s Apollo 10 Command Module, he took questions from schoolchildren who were crowding around to get a close look at the space veteran, who was played by Tom Hanks in the film Apollo 13.

But later Lovell admitted that if he was offered the opportunity to go into space today, "I would think twice about it", because it could be "a half-assed programme that might die".

The contrast could not be more stark with what happened after he was blasted into space on 11 April 1970, on his second Moon mission.

Nasa marshalled all of its extraordinary resources, and the ingenuity of Lovell and his crew, to bring Apollo 13 safely home after an explosion ruptured two oxygen tanks 200,000 miles away from Earth.

Although the Apollo 13 radio message saying "failure is not an option" is as mythical as "Houston, we have a problem" (changed in the film from "Houston, we’ve had a problem"), it perfectly captures the spirit of the age of Apollo, when astronauts with the right stuff remained calm in a time of great danger, and almost anything seemed possible.

Skip forward to 2004, when a great venture to the Moon and Mars was announced by President Bush. But the subsequent Constellation Program did not really get off the launch pad and was cancelled by President Obama.

"I was unhappy about that," said Lovell. Now Nasa is working on the prosaically named Space Launch System, or SLS. This "big rocket", as Lovell describes it, will be capable of lifting astronauts and hardware to asteroids, the Moon and Mars. But Nasa, he declared, is like a ship without a rudder.

Today it is fashionable to say the real future lies in commercial space ventures: the Cygnus spacecraft of Orbital Sciences, and Dragon of SpaceX, founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk, have docked with the International Space Station. Boeing and the Sierra Nevada Corporation are working on space taxis. Lovell himself is involved with Golden Spike, a private spacefaring venture that relies on existing technology to return to the moon.

The original Apollo 13 crew. From left to right are: Commander, James A Lovell, Command Module pilot, Thomas K Mattingly and Lunar Module pilot, Fred W Haise. (Photo: Rex)

But Lovell points out that many of these private ventures depend heavily on Nasa subsidies, and are hardly commercial in the sense that he understands but a "government-funded programme without the oversight a government programme would normally have". Yes, this set-up can be more nimble and efficient but, leaving aside the little suborbital hops planned by Virgin Galactic, it is a long way from launching cargo to the risky business of ‘man rated’ technology capable of both lofting humans into space and then taking them somewhere like Mars. No wonder that ambitious targets for manned missions set by commercial ventures are slipping.

Even Nasa is currently dependent on the Soyuz capsules of their former rivals Russia. The US forks out $71 million (£46 million) per seat to reach the International Space Station. Meanwhile, Lovell remarks, the Chinese programme "is coming along very well" and it is obvious – at least to him – that, they should join forces with Japan, Russia, European Space Agency and Nasa, as with the space station, so that humankind can take the next great step. "It depends on how serious we are, and how cooperative we are going to get.”

To him, the reason world governments should work together is obvious: the Apollo programme was a virtuoso demonstration of how manned space exploration not only provides a boost to science and technology but has vast intangible benefits, notably in education. Standing next to him in the museum last week, before a sea of children with upturned faces, it was hard to not to agree.